Brooklyn Nets: 3 blueprints to return to NBA relevance

Breaking down the three blueprints that will get the Brooklyn Nets back to NBA relevance

The Brooklyn Nets are bad. The Brooklyn Nets have been bad, and will be for the foreseeable future…. but the end is not just near, it’s in sight.

I grew up in a Christian household. No, I’m not going to preach to you, or impose my beliefs on you. What I am going to talk to you about is church basketball.

Now church basketball might seem like an oxymoron, but let me tell you folks – it’s a real thing, and it gets, well, real.

Growing up I was taller than everyone, so naturally, because I was tall, my parents made me play basketball. (I’m kidding, I love basketball, and wouldn’t trade my experiences for anything). What is sincere is that I was almost always the big man on whatever team I played on. Now, I’m not very athletic, so my role was to set screens, get boards, and try and get fouled on putbacks. I’d score four or six points a game, and that was that. I played in various rec leagues, but was always the third or fourth option. Nothing too exciting.

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Fast forward to when I started playing church basketball, and things got real. For those of you out there reading this that think that Christians aren’t trash talkers, and sit around sipping tea on plates on top of doilies judging people, well, you’re wrong. I heard more cursing and played more physical in church basketball then I did in any other rec league.

Let me paint you a picture.

One game I was guarding a kid that was probably 5-foot-8 or 5-foot-9, but he probably weighed close to 250 pounds, so a big dude. I am not 250 pounds, so he had a size mismatch; but luckily he was even less athletic than me – he just experienced success in our league because his spirit animal was Z-Bo with a touch of a sloth’s agility.

On one possession he was backing me down, but his ball-handling skills were equivalent to a little kid dribbling with his palm thinking it was cute, but correct. I poked the ball away from him (which would lead to a fast break layup for my team), and as we were running up the court he bumped me and said, ‘Stop fouling me’; except he added another word between stop and fouling, and it rhymes with ducking.

Now, I would consider myself competitive, but it takes a lot to get under my skin. A couple more possessions would go by, and a few subs were made during that time, and the kid stayed in; cursing up a storm and complaining about everything. So naturally, I’d had it. On the next defensive possession, I was going to stuff him like Thanksgiving turkey. So I did. The possession:

Their point guard dribbled the ball across mid-court, stopping at the top of the key, dribbling in place. You could see his eyes surveying, waiting, watching for an opportunity to drive; or find a mismatch via the many screens they’d been setting all game. The opportunity came – I was matched up on wannabe Z-Bo (WZ-Bo). What the PG and WZ-Bo didn’t know is that I had motioned for my buddy to switch with me on defense.

The PG tossed the ball to him, and WZ-Bo began backing me down, thinking he was going to score. Not today. He stopped, pivoted, and quickly turned the other way thinking he had fooled me and released the ball towards the basket…. only to see it fly directly into my team’s bench who exploded into hooting and hollering.

WZ-Bo went quiet for the rest of the game, and I think I actually did the Mutombo finger wag. Maybe I wish I had. Regardless, it was one of the best plays of my short-lived church basketball career, and I will treasure it forever. So why did I waste your time telling you about my childhood?

The simple answer: to setup a metaphor.

Think of the Brooklyn Nets as WZ-Bo, and the NBA as me. The Nets have tinkered and messed with many-a-lineup over the past couple of seasons, mainly due to the fact that no one wanted to come and play for the Nets unless they were traded there; so the Nets coaching staff was forced to give heavy minutes to D-League call-ups, washed up veterans (remember Luis Scola? How about AK-47? Reggie Evans?), and reclamation projects.

They had to experiment. They have to experiment. They have no other choice.

So they back down in the paint, excited about their brief spurts of success, only to be blocked and lose game after game after game; and back to the drawing board. But I think they might have started to find a winning formula.

The Nets typical starting lineup towards the end of the season was Linsanity, Randy Foye, Caris LeVert, Rondae Hollis-Jefferson, and Brook Lopez. Honestly, not a bad group on paper – just on the court it didn’t translate into wins. While the jury’s still out on whether playing the 6-foot-7 combo guard-forward(?) RHJ at the 4 is a recipe for success, it is a sign that the Nets are moving towards playing actual basketball. (Side note: Brook Lopez shot 34.6% from 3 this year on 5.2 attempts a game.)

Now, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t consider Brook Lopez the face of the franchise since he’s in trade rumors every two seconds. Heck, I would say Lin is closer to being considered the face of the franchise, and his claim to fame happened with that other team in New York. The Nets are no longer directionless, but they are faceless. I’m here to fix that.

I’m going to provide three ways that the Nets can get their fans a face of the franchise – trade, free agency, and one atypical way. At the end of each section I’ll give a brief blurb on how realistic I think each route would be to gain a new face of the franchise. I’m going to begin in inverse order.